The Newspaper Industry: What’s Really Dying?

Before you read any further, I understand the irony of this piece given its location is in fact in a newspaper, one that is very much alive.

Though newspaper sales are plummeting and have been, newsrooms that previously buzzed with activity have been downsized and as a result, almost completely muted.

Perhaps even more vexing, many of our nation’s most famous newspapers are being sold by their owners. This includes the New York Daily News, which in addition to being the fourth most circulated newspaper in the United States, has been up for sale since the spring of 2015.

Despite all this, I feel the only real problem of the newspaper’s supposed “death” is in the question itself.

Certainly, printed word has seen better days in terms of popularity but it seems that for the most part people simply do not care to purchase physical papers any longer. But online sources for news are as viable as they have ever been.

This coupled with the adaptations of prominent former “social” media apps to allow for news coverage leads me to believe that people are in fact only getting more interested in the news.

Our culture is seemingly one that finds it difficult to let go of traditions, even if all the evidence points to its irrelevance already having been met. This is certainly true in the case of newspapers.

Print newspapers are on the way out. However, it is wrong to say they are “dying,” not because the industry will be led to revitalize the press but because the things were never alive in the first place. Newspapers are paper, a substance once organic now wholly dead and made unnatural.

As a society, we often attach the word death or dying with technologies, innovations, corporations and even relationships. This is not a critique but as a means for one to ponder the peculiarity with which we as Americans greet changing circumstances.

At the outset of the internet, I doubt many assumed it would precede the rapid and reflexive shift of an industry that dominated journalism since its dawn.

But now, in the latter half of its second decade, it has. The internet has changed the way we receive, perceive, and often times regurgitate information, forcing the news industry to seek new avenues to more quickly and concisely find information and inform the public.

This is indeed a powerful avenue. Man has walked on the moon and now they have created a wormhole through which information can be created in one hemisphere and just as quickly be found and interpreted in another.

How on earth could a piece of paper that need be printed and physically distributed compete with such a grossly captivating innovation?

Is it really the feel of paper and the bold black print that some find comfortable, or is it the ability to hold onto the past in one’s hands without the ever-changing reality getting in the way?

We are slow to react in many ways to the technological innovations that are being initiated and completed in this very moment, as they’ve been for decades. This is a completely understandable phenomenon, though when it comes to newspapers, I think we should not bother with the question of their imminent demise.

News will always be relevant. Though its content is seemingly growing less factual and more opinion based, news as an institution is here to stay as long as the current society is upheld.

The question that journalists and everyday citizens alike should ask their peers is not whether or not this industry is going to “die,” but if what is being spread in its place is acceptable and truly for the good of the public.

While newspapers may be dying a slow death, the real issue is the loss of journalism. The vast majority of “content” on the internet is recycled drivel that barely passes as hearsay, let alone fact. The real shame is that hard news, and especially investigative news, are going by the wayside in a frighteningly rapid manner. This allows the actual news to be tightly controlled by conglomerates in an ever shrinking circle. Which means the only real news people get is the news that is fed to us by the major networks and few remaining newspapers (whether in print or online). The death of objective reporting as well as investigative journalism, has already had far reaching effects throughout societies. The mere fact that information is so unreliable and so fragmented in its delivery creates a huge vacuum where the major news outlets can dictate a powerful form of thought control via a strict diet of entertainment news and sanitized reporting. Universities today do us even more a disservice by only promoting a singular political discourse/narrative, thereby leading to the further decline of real education and diversity of viewpoints. Doesn’t anyone else find it ironic that the very diversity championed by this university for decades has actually led to a complete lack of diversity of thought/viewpoints? The news business is dying and along with it a lot of the transparency that made America what it is (or used to be). It’s one of the most serious signs of the decline of the civilization.